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Match.com Used Fake Ads to Swindle Users, F.T.C. Says

519 points by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

namanaggarwal 7y ago
Unrelated to the post, but I am just wondering how come NYTimes still able to detect the incognito mode or if you are using private browser like Firefox focus
- tyingq 7y ago
  It's an arms race. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-incognito-mode-can-still-be-detected-by-these-methods/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-i...
  - stickfigure 7y ago
    I wouldn't use the term 'arms race' because that implies each side can continue to escalate. A better way of looking at it is that there are bugs that leak information in browsers, and sites like the NYT are spending developer effort to discover those bugs and publish them (in the form of javascript) so that browser developers can fix them. The browser developers will eventually win this one.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      "Eventually" hasn't come yet, and I doubt it will come anytime soon.
    - onemoresoop 7y ago
      Whats the incentive to publish them? Isnt it in NYT’s best interest to be able to detect incognito mode?
      - Deimorz 7y ago
        They're not intentionally publishing them, but they effectively have to because the detection uses Javascript, and you can view that JS and figure out what it's checking for.
      - DenseComet 7y ago
        Not publish them per say, but those methods are obviously in the javascript on the page and inspectable.
- skellera 7y ago
  As someone mentioned here the other day, reader mode on safari, or any other browser with it, can get around to seeing the article. Just lose out on images and stuff.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Lately I've been trying just disabling Javascript in the dev console, and that seems to be working pretty well!
- enjoyyourlife 7y ago
  I use the Hide Private Mode add-on and it works on the NY Times
echelon 7y ago
The FTC needs to come down hard on this. Extremely hard. This isn't just a trick, it's outright fraud. They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved. Think about how vulnerable people become when they're searching for love. And then this corporate giant comes in with an army of psychologists, A/B tests, and analysts to figure out how to best extract their pound of flesh and offer nothing in return. Forgive me for saying this, but fuck Match.com. The FTC should evaporate half their liquid assets / market cap in fines.
- smt88 7y ago
  I agree and will add that all dating apps do things like this. They prey on lonely people using false hope. Tinder even introduced paid “boosts” (pay to be shown to users who otherwise might never see you), which is identical to a slot machine.
  - gowld 7y ago
    I don't think there's a problem with honestly offering a promotional feature. Personal responsibility still counts. If you want to pay to get your face out there, you deserve the right.
    - smt88 7y ago
      Sure, but the problem is that there's no transparency. You don't know if your boost showed you to 50 more people, 5 more, or 0. Maybe you get a match during your boost. A random reward! And only Tinder knows whether your boost caused it or not. There's very unilateral information in every transaction with dating apps, and that's the problem.
  - echelon 7y ago
    OkCupid charges more for your membership the older you are. By the time you're in your 30s the rate is outright highway robbery.
    - 7y ago
RandomBacon 7y ago
Unrelated, but I'm thinking about using one or more dating sites. Which ones do people here use, and what are your thoughts/observations?
- seibelj 7y ago
  I met my wife on Tinder 6 years ago, but YMMV
- werber 7y ago
  I've had great luck with Scruff, and have had friends who have done well with bumble
  - tempsy 7y ago
    A bit presumptuous to assume the OP is a gay male, no?
    - queercode 7y ago
      It's no more presumptuous to assume OP is a straight male.
      - tempsy 7y ago
        Right. If someone asks what a good dating app is then the better thing to do is to not assume sexual orientation or gender and recommend an app for all e.g. Tinder/Coffee Meets Bagel/Hinge? I mean, just thought it was weird for a complete stranger to recommend to another complete stranger a gay hookup app for men...
        werber 7y ago
        I just recommended Scruff first because that's where I met my partner, it's way more than just a sex app! They have events and a tinder like mode where you can only match with other people looking for a relationship.
      - deleted 7y ago
zaroth 7y ago
TFA is a bit imprecise with the wording, so it's not exactly clear to me, but from what I understand, there's two different things that could be happening. In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their site, where there weren't actually very many women on the site at all. Alternatively, a dating site can be rife with scammers who have themselves created fake profiles on the site and are messaging potential victims. For example, I read that Tinder used to be particularly rife with bot accounts that would message obviously bot-y greetings to attempt to get a user to click an external link (to what end, I'm not sure). In the second case, dating sites may have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the scammers, who create appealing looking profiles and make the site seem to have more activity than it really does. But the real users are potentially being targeted for fraud / scams, so this is just as--if not even more--egregious than the false marketing fake account scam, because at least the company bots aren't trying to convince you to share your bank account number. It's not entirely clear to me if this is a case of #1 or #2, but it seems like it's #2. And because Match wouldn't even let potential users read the message (or see who it was from?) before signing up, the bot accounts would provide a significant signup boost to users thinking they had a potential match waiting for them on the site. If it is #2, then the immediate question is how prevalent was this, and did Match take action to close bot accounts that were reported / flagged as such. Any social network will have at least some bad actors, and the platform should be judged on how they respond and defend against those actors, not whether they existed at all. I think TFA does not provide enough information to reach a conclusion.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  #2 sounds like a twisted symbiotic parasitic relationship, where the host is harmed indirectly through the harm of their users. Almost like some sort of systemic effect. Fraud is such an interesting problem. Are the incentives ever truly aligned such that businesses should rigorously stamp out bad actors? Or, in a toxic twist, should they do the bare minimum to satisfy some regulatory body/their brand perception? Treacherous times indeed.
- cardiffspaceman 7y ago
shartshooter 7y ago
Juicy part from the actual complaint. Since at least 2013, Defendant has maintained the following five deceptive or unfair practices to induce consumers to subscribe to Match.com and to keep them subscribed. First, until mid-2018, Defendant sent consumers misleading advertisements that tout communications from persons Defendant identified as potentially fraudulent users of Match.com and led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them. Second, until mid-2018, Defendant exposed consumers to the risk of fraud by providing recent subscribers access to communications that Defendant knew were likely to have been sent by persons engaging in fraud. Third, until mid-2019, Defendant guaranteed certain consumers a free six-month subscription renewal if they fail to “meet someone special” but failed to disclose the requirements of its “guarantee” adequately. Fourth, Defendant has misled consumers with a confusing and cumbersome cancellation process that causes consumers to believe they have canceled their subscriptions when they have not. Fifth, until mid-2019, when consumers disputed charges relating to any of these practices and lose the dispute, Defendant denied consumers access to paid-for services. [1] [1]https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_complaint.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_com...
- trhway 7y ago
  > led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them. reminded about that Ashley Madison actual ratio in their database of something like 3 real girls to ten of millions of men, with the employees&bots producing all those "communications"
- malicioususer11 7y ago
  didnt read all that. sounds shitty, actually...
- makomk 7y ago
  Wow, apparently they had a stock line they used when customers paid them money to try and view those messages that were sent by fake accounts, got a message saying the account was unavailable instead (because it had been deleted for being fraudulent), and complained to Match.com that they thought they'd been swindled: "Please be assured, Match.com does not send members misleading notifications, e-mails or winks professing romantic interest. We have too much respect for our members to ever compromise their trust. If you have received communications from members with profiles that are not immediately available, the member may have temporarily hidden their profile." That is impressively scummy.
chongli 7y ago
I think it's a fatal flaw in the dating site business model, to be honest. Their incentive is for you to stay on the site for as long as possible. If you could find a relationship quickly and then they would leave the site quickly. This would reduce the amount of ad and subscription revenue, in addition to reducing the size of the pool of "potential matches", discouraging those who have more trouble finding someone.
- bigwavedave 7y ago
  Ah yes, the only profession aside from medicine that exists to eradicate itself.
  - bitexploder 7y ago
    I work in information security and we have effectively consulted ourselves out of a job and were happy to do it. Some customers only need our help for a while, others need it for much longer :)
  - warent 7y ago
    I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I'm inferring a tone of sarcasm from your comment but I'm not sure what you're really trying to communicate here.
    - xeromal 7y ago
      I don't think they're being sarcastic. It's a market that when done efficiently and successfully, puts itself out of business. The better medicine gets, the less patients they get.
  - taneq 7y ago
    The goal of any consultancy should be to get your clients to the point where they no longer need you.
    - canada_dry 7y ago
jdkee 7y ago
At what point do we as a society, regulate the abuses promulgated by libertarianism, techno-utopianism, Reaganism and the pathologies enabled by unfettered captialism? The same social pathologies that lead to the extreme income inequality in the United States and the unchecked externalities of carbon emissions. Or not.
- lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  Maybe we should try a system where there's no property and the state takes care of every aspect of the citizen's life. People wouldn't need to work as much and the government would be honest and nice to everyone (except filthy dissidents). I'm sure it won't end in a totalitarian bloodshed.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
paul7986 7y ago
All dating apps are filled with fakes and scams mostly perpetrated by those who own the app to milk you of your money. Ive used match on and off for awhile and the crap stunt of them sending me a bunch of likes, messages just as my subscription is expiring has always ticked me off. Ummm where were these matches the first few weeks and oh wait if i want to find out if they are fake or not i have to subscribe again. Though after the first time of realizing I was being hookwinked by match I never re-up my subscription.
- 14 7y ago
  I on occasion would like to browse Tinder if I have time. One time after like half hour I get a pop up that I have used all my likes for the time being but if I pay I can continue to swipe right on people I like. Ok not interested in that so I will wait the 12 hours or whatever it is and not pay anything. We I forget about it and of course they send me a notification telling me someone likes me find out now who! So I load up the app and then again hit with the I have used too many likes and have a few more hours to wait. I felt a little annoyed and I have no idea if they are measuring some metric or not but like to believe they are so after I get hit with a like paywall I exit the app and do not load it for a couple days. I like to think it scares them into thinking I am leaving which is ultimately what I ended up doing.
yumario 7y ago
Rewriting one of my earlier comments: I have used Tinder (owned by Match) before and it was one of the must frustrating experiences ever. First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for months. God knows how many companies now have my data. Second, they employ dark patterns: 1) Easy account deletion. Why does that matter? Because they own nearly all dating sites. Including: "BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful, FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge" So, they don't care if they lose a user as long as they can shuffle them around. 2) They will keep a tab of the number of users who have like you. Then eventually that user will shown to you and you will swipe left or right. In that case the tab count will decrease. This is a complete scam. They would withhold these users to push to a pay subscription. Example: https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg . Moreover, most of these likes a bots and fake profiles. 3) Fake notifications: https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg 4) Shadows-bans: I saw that my profile was getting no matches. So I made a new profile, ban! a match within minutes. Essentially they shadow ban users as a form of Neg.
- dmoy 7y ago
  To be fair on the last part, shadow ban can be an extremely efficient moderation tool, though for people caught up as false positive collateral damage it can really suck. This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other place I've moderated before.
  - gizmo686 7y ago
    On a free product, I have no problems with shadow bans. On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.
    - yumario 7y ago
      Yep, having used Tinder's paid boots and seeing no results. And then making a new profile with the same photos and bio! and getting results within minutes left me feeling rob and manipulated.
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Do you think that an open source dating app or a decentralized dating protocol would be a good idea?
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Dating apps are a failed idea. If you're a man and have any imperfections appearance-wise you'll go on these sites and get no responses. In college I did hundreds of swipes and sent a bunch of messages on OKC and got nothing because I wasn't a human Ken doll. I could've spent all day in the gym and gotten plastic surgery and spent hundreds on whatever wardrobe was in style but why do all that for people who can't appreciate you for anything else but how likely you are to be in a Calvin Klein ad? I've seen experiments where they put male model pictures on tinder profiles that say stuff like being nazis and convicted rapists and surprise, they got more matches (a ton) than me (0) with my well-thought-out profile/pictures but not literally Brad Pitt.
  - ddenisen 7y ago
    So I've had an interesting experience recently. Like you, I've used Tinder and other dating apps fairly unsuccessfully in the past (close to zero matches, those who match don't respond, yadda yadda). I live in the US (West Coast), but I'm originally from Russia, and I finally got to go back home (a major Russian city) this summer for a few weeks' vacation. On a suggestion of a longtime friend I've met with there, I've created a Tinder profile. Just put up some mediocre photos of myself and listed my hobbies, mentioned I am visiting for a few weeks. The difference from the US was quite startling. I got literally hundreds of likes and dozens of matches. (my like counter showed 99+ after a week). The matches weren't bots either. They were actual women, and a decent number of them responded to my messages. I've actually ended up meeting four different women in person during a time span of two weeks. We've had some good in person conversations and I still keep in touch with at least one of them. They didn't seem like they just wanted me so that I can bring them to the US, either, as that never came up in conversations and they seemed fairly happy where they currently are. I was honestly quite sad to leave and come home to the USA because it felt like I'm returning to a social wasteland. Later, I've on a whim set my Tinder location to Philippines one night (might be going there for work this winter), and got a decent number of matches instantly, and the ones I've talked to responded willingly. I've also gotten a ton of matches when I was on vacation in Dominican Republic last winter. Of course, if I use my actual location (Seattle) I still get basically zero matches. I've had similar low success in Western Europe. So, your dating app status as a dude is really location dependent.
xenospn 7y ago
"How to lose all your users in 30 days"
fortran77 7y ago
You mean there aren't really hot girls in 94027 zip code looking for a date?!
- degski 7y ago
  Nah, they just want to have sex with you.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  I like having an ISP with most of its customers in another region. It separates the low-end and the high-end geo-targeters.
- buboard 7y ago
  try rebooting your router
- masonic 7y ago
  Atherton? That's really hitting the out-of-your-league jackpot.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  The hottest girls hang out around Anonymous Proxy
1024core 7y ago
Back when I was single, I was on a dozen dating sites. It was frustrating as heck to keep getting led on by fake profiles. eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit. Someone has already linked to the OKCupid blog post which explained pretty well why you should not pay for a dating site. Then they were bought out by Match (how did the anti-trust people let Match accumulate so many sites?), and any principles they had went down the drain. Basically, the market is ripe for a respectful dating site. But OKCupid started this way; and in the end they sold out. What makes you think you won't sell out when the money is right?
- jdm2212 7y ago
  I do the same thing with a gmail address -- just do myemail+uniqueid@gmail.com, because gmail drops everything after the + for routing the email but still tells you which address it was sent to.
  - dmarlow 7y ago
    I used to do this, but I kept forgetting the "uniqueid" for the sites I used. I'd often resort to using my regular email for the forget password prompts and then would have to search my inbox to figure out the correct email (if using from another device where the creds aren't saved).
    - inetknght 7y ago
      Today that problem is solved by the use of a password manager.
  - Splatter 7y ago
    What's frustrating is that very many sites know of this method and simply trim the "+uniqueid" from a gmail.com address before inserting it into their database.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
joering2 7y ago
If its proven then its obviously criminal in its nature as it clearly a scam to enrich owners. If FTC prevails, does anyone have any idea what sort of consequences are we looking at? Company? Owners?
tibbydudeza 7y ago
I dunno how you can possibly quantify human emotions based on metrics and algorithms. Level 5 self driving cars is a more realistic goal to achieve than this one.
- buboard 7y ago
  psychologists have done it for centuries
caseysoftware 7y ago
Years ago, I briefly consulted for a dating website and fundamentally their business model is broken and their incentives are completely misaligned with the users': https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website
- foobar_ 7y ago
  That was a good read. > Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product.. Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well? From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time customers.
  - w84it 7y ago
    Television
    - raverbashing 7y ago
      Yeah Cable TV wasn't like that, but what's better, money or more money??
Impossible 7y ago
This happened to me when I tried subscribing to match years ago. Near the end of my 6 month period I got the first introduction from a woman after months of rarely getting responses. This email never resulted in anything. Paid dating sites all ended up being worthless to me and the only dates and reasonable correspondence I got on was from OKCupid (where I met my wife).
liquidise 7y ago
Former CTO of a multi-mllion user dating app. I am certain Match will claim plausible deniability here, the reality is such an argument would be a total farce. While spam prevention is technically not a "solved" problem, simple and clever techniques in addition to shadow-banning go a long way. Once an account has sufficient activity, which for spammers takes anywhere from 30s - 4hr, even modest systems can confidently identify the vast majority. A company like Match that has conglomerated other upstarts in the space surely has spammer identification systems far in excess of smaller apps. Yet somehow those competing apps often cite account authenticity as an advantage over Match. The Ashley Madison scandal exposed this business tactic. Match clearly followed suit and has been just-subtle-enough to evade legal action until now.
- amelius 7y ago
  Speaking of plausible deniability, those 1000s of illegally downloaded videos on my harddrive were uploaded to my computer by a botnet. But come on, if you are a large business then you should know what is going on in your company.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Whenever I read stuff like this, I think in my head: names. We want names. We want these people to never do this again.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin
Shaddox 7y ago
I worked for about 3/4th of a year for a dating website. The market is ...unique, to put it nicely. Employees are constantly poached. When my boss told me this I couldn't believe it but it actually happened. During lunchtime, it became an often occurrence for someone to come and talk to me to try and reveal secrets. Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1 gal so building a dating platform is hard.
meerita 7y ago
If authorities dig a little bit more they will find all these dating websites break the GDPR laws a lot.
- w84it 7y ago
  Dont need no cookies if i can just https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2 https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2 you
mnm1 7y ago
They also didn't honor their free extra months for users who didn't find a match the first six months. The whole site is a scam and shouldn't be operating.
malicioususer11 7y ago
i dont give two fucks about match.com, but its called priming the pump. not illegal, I dont think??? :)
LeonM 7y ago
I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and all of them are like this. First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs. The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles. Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone. The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed. I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.
- pepy 7y ago
  Fractional Reserve Speed Dating http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-reserve-speed-dating.html http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-res...
- arkh 7y ago
  > I'd say it's about 80% male. It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.
  - Lewton 7y ago
    On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%
z3t4 7y ago
What about other fakes ? likes, followers, stars, collaborators, upvotes, star-reviews, backlinks, and clients. Where do you draw the line between fraud and Fake it until you make it ? Social proof is game-able and there is a whole industry dedicated to faking it. Should fakes be punished, or are you too naive for using these metrics when choosing - for example, what library to use, who to hire, or what restaurant to go to?
apexalpha 7y ago
There is only one universal law that applies to online dating, and that is: women don't need it as much as men. For women, online dating just doesn't make sense. Even on Tinder, where the ratio is kinda okay, women are bombarded with messages and likes. To the point that they can't even respond to everyone even if they wanted to. This means men are left with unresponsive women and just start to send cheaper pick up lines to more women faster. Thus continuing the cycle of women getting bombarded... There was a blog post I read once where some employee used statistics from the dating site to show what the relationship between male and female profiles where, who had good chance of getting dates etc... Conclusion: it really doesn't work for 90% of men.
- AdrianB1 7y ago
  I know a few women that use Tinder: they are alone, late thirties and never got anything serious out of Tinder, but they use it to reassure their attractiveness by the continuous flow of likes they get. It is a morale booster, nothing more.
  - stochastic_monk 7y ago
    I know plenty of straight couples who are married or in committed long term relationships and met on tinder.
    - AdrianB1 7y ago
      I am not contesting that, I just answered to "For women, online dating just doesn't make sense".
    - LeonM 7y ago
      I think there is a big early adopter advantage of any dating platform. After a while, the platform just deteriorates and starts attracting opportunists. I also know a bunch of couples that met on tinder, but it's all from 3 years ago. I haven't heard of someone else who has been successful in finding a long term relationship on Tinder since.
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mschuster91 7y ago
To all those ITT complaining about bots... check out the fetish/kink/niche dating sites. Granted there's still a problem with thirsty dudes if you're female but at least no bots. If you're looking for random sex, many swinger clubs also allow single men (single females are almost universally welcome), either always or at special events. If you're in a relationship and your s/o is interested, I can also recommend visiting swinger clubs for a change.
anonymousmatch 7y ago
I'm quite hesitant to tell this story and unfortunately, because I'm ashamed of myself, and for privacy reasons I had to create a new account for this but I wanted to tell the story of the day my mother fell in love with me. Long story short, many years ago I was working for a provider that was building algorithms for various dating websites. The goal was simple: Increase signups. A Little Bit of Background -------------------------- As a small group of rather "creative" engineers in their early twenties encouraged by large sums of money we came up with the idea of building "Matching Personas" which would be able to have a basic conversation, as well as have similar interests in the target subject. Keep in mind that some of those dating sites have various "upgrade" (read payment) paths. Some had a "3 private messages" limit so that you can start chatting with someone but to continue the conversation, you needed to upgrade to premium. The typical path for a user was: 1. Visit the website and search for what they're interested in 2. See a few profiles and decide whether online dating was their thing 3. Invest personal time creating a profile and putting down their interests, photos, etc. Point #3 is where the magic came in. I had been working on automating the creation of accounts, and more importantly the creation of what we used to call smart-accounts. After a few months we had increased the conversion rate by about 30% on average (Which is MASSIVE) and our internal funding was getting larger and larger. Our smart accounts ended up being able to recognize certain items in photos, understand the interests of new users, have "similar" interests that are either the same or tangentially related, similar number of kids, etc. etc. Based on real matches we built an engine that learnt what people look for when they convert. How the conversations go, the type of language used when discussing, the similarities in interests and family, etc. Honestly a really wide set of super interesting machine learning problems from object recognition to natural language processing to recommender systems to LTSM, etc. It was pretty simple. A user signs up and they put some of their information in. Our engine picks up the latest user's information, creates about 10 different "smart profiles" that the new user is likely to match, and then in the search results display those smart-accounts to the new user who just joined. The new user would see smart accounts, and start chatting with them on their free accounts. Because we knew based on previous real matches and real conversations how people ended up "being together", the unsuspecting free users. The conversion path was: Signup -> Fill profile -> See someone you like -> Converse -> Upgrade. The Day my Mother Fell in Love with Me -------------------------------------- Now that you have a little bit of background, the story begins. I had been working for many of the dating companies (most of them competitors) for a few months and our smart-profiles were getting quite clever. One night after my mother invited me for diner. We started eating and drinking wine and just talking in general. I never talked about the general aspects of my work but she knew I worked with computers and back then statistics now machine learning now everything-is-AI-anyways. Whilst on the topic of computers, she said: "Oh I haven't told you, I've actually met someone online". I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was quite nice. Then she proceeded to tell me the following: "He also has 3 kids, he likes a lot of the same stuff I like which is really nice, and we started chatting and he's really nice. He's gone on a business trip now so we haven't talked in a few days but I'm looking forward to talking to him again". At that moment I became very suspicious because all the signs pointed to exactly what we had been aiming at achieving. Get users to like someone, signup, chat (Which had a limit of 50 free messages at the time for that particular platform if I remember), and convert (pay) to have more chats. The trick was when people upgraded, within hours, we had some canned answers like "I'm going on a business trip won't be able to talk for about 2 weeks". Either way, I started asking my mother a few more questions and she explained to me that she had found him after signing up and they chatted a little bit but she had to upgrade yaddi yadda and it wasn't cheap but she was glad she didn't end up wasting so much time online dating like all those other people online dating. Then I asked her about the particular website and it was one we had been working with. She had actually fallen in love with my bots. I felt terrible not only for my mother but for the thousands of other people we had basically scammed, and only at that moment did it hit me. Up until then it was a fun challenging ML engineering problem with real-world subjects. I quit the following day and have never been affiliated or interested in either working or using online dating since. Even though I do have friends who got married to people they have met online dating, it made me a cynical.
gerardnll 7y ago
How weird, yesterday, someone signed up using my email on match.com and firstmet.com, what a coincidence...
oldmanthrowit 7y ago
A decade or so ago I worked at AdultFriendFinder.com, then the largest dating site. We had 20 or so different properties, covering every niche from "jewishfriendfinder" to "alt.com" On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we didn't create the fake users. These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk is far worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/
oldmanthrowit 7y ago
OKCupid and Tinder, I think, are the only honest dating sites, and they've gotten far less so the past few years.
- SaturateDK 7y ago
  Not surprising... the new owners of both OKCupid and Tinder is Match Group.
  - oldmanthrowit 7y ago
    OKCupid held onto their integrity as long as they could. After the HotOrNot-derived dating apps popped up, and the Match purchase, they definitely lost their way. If I had to date again, I would just meet people at bars, without OKCupid's rather effective personality matches (engaged to one person I met there, married another, slept with dozens), dating apps mostly seem pointless.
greggman2 7y ago
Japan has "Pairs" with no free tier. Doesn't seem to have fake profiles. "Dine" also has no free tier for men but seems to be 50% fake profiles just based on how professional the profile photos look relative to all other sites .
burneraccount12 7y ago
Dating threads on HN honestly could be confused for incel message boards on Reddit. Some real quotes from this thread: 1. "As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone." 2. "I know a few women that use Tinder: they are alone, late thirties and never got anything serious out of Tinder, but they use it to reassure their attractiveness" 3. "Bumble's rule is that Men are not even allowed to initiate contact...Given everything else happening in the world around gender discrimination, I find it interesting that a discussion around Bumble's practises has not come up." 4. "It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone." 5. "All dating apps are filled with fakes and scams mostly perpetrated by those who own the app to milk you of your money." 6. "They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved." Burner account because this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but guys: grow up. Stop whining. Stop blaming women -- they pursue the most attractive males just like you pursue the most attractive women, it's normal. If you want to improve your dating prospects, get in shape. Anyone can get in shape, doesn't matter how rich or successful or handsome your face is. Second, improve your social skills / join something. Volunteer somewhere. Join a run or hiking club. Don't just sit behind your computer and foam at the mouth how all the "Chads" are taking all the "Staceys". HN has, IMHO, the best commentary about tech on the internet. And the absolute worst commentary on dating.
- tictok4 7y ago
  >If you want to improve your dating prospects, get in shape. Anyone can get in shape, doesn't matter how rich or successful or handsome your face is. >Second, improve your social skills / join something. Yes to both of these. Dating or not these are vital in life.
  - Jonathanks 7y ago
    "Dating or not, these are vital in life." I don't mean to be pedantic, but, without the comma, I read it wrong twice. I agree with you totally. I'm currently looking for a course I can volunteer for outside my day job.
  - 7y ago
jrnichols 7y ago
I have no doubt that Tinder is also loaded with fake profiles to encourage user engagement as well.
- chrift 7y ago
  I am also of the mind that all the social media platforms do this. I hardly ever use Instagram, but whenever I get a notification from someone I know is obviously fake I always get caught in the rabbit hole of my feed.
rootusrootus 7y ago
I wonder if I would be successful today, were I looking for someone using an online service. 11 years ago I met my wife on Match, and I had had dated a few other people from the site before I met her. I am just average looking for sure, maybe these days I wouldn't get any responses at all.
andrewalan 7y ago
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Unrelated to the post, but I am just wondering how come NYTimes still able to detect the incognito mode or if you are using private browser like Firefox focus

tyingq 7y ago
It's an arms race. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-incognito-mode-can-still-be-detected-by-these-methods/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-chrome-i...
- stickfigure 7y ago
  I wouldn't use the term 'arms race' because that implies each side can continue to escalate. A better way of looking at it is that there are bugs that leak information in browsers, and sites like the NYT are spending developer effort to discover those bugs and publish them (in the form of javascript) so that browser developers can fix them. The browser developers will eventually win this one.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    "Eventually" hasn't come yet, and I doubt it will come anytime soon.
  - onemoresoop 7y ago
    Whats the incentive to publish them? Isnt it in NYT’s best interest to be able to detect incognito mode?
    - Deimorz 7y ago
      They're not intentionally publishing them, but they effectively have to because the detection uses Javascript, and you can view that JS and figure out what it's checking for.
    - DenseComet 7y ago
      Not publish them per say, but those methods are obviously in the javascript on the page and inspectable.
skellera 7y ago
As someone mentioned here the other day, reader mode on safari, or any other browser with it, can get around to seeing the article. Just lose out on images and stuff.
zaroth 7y ago
Lately I've been trying just disabling Javascript in the dev console, and that seems to be working pretty well!
enjoyyourlife 7y ago
I use the Hide Private Mode add-on and it works on the NY Times

echelon 7y ago

The FTC needs to come down hard on this. Extremely hard. This isn't just a trick, it's outright fraud. They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved. Think about how vulnerable people become when they're searching for love. And then this corporate giant comes in with an army of psychologists, A/B tests, and analysts to figure out how to best extract their pound of flesh and offer nothing in return. Forgive me for saying this, but fuck Match.com. The FTC should evaporate half their liquid assets / market cap in fines.

smt88 7y ago
I agree and will add that all dating apps do things like this. They prey on lonely people using false hope. Tinder even introduced paid “boosts” (pay to be shown to users who otherwise might never see you), which is identical to a slot machine.
- gowld 7y ago
  I don't think there's a problem with honestly offering a promotional feature. Personal responsibility still counts. If you want to pay to get your face out there, you deserve the right.
  - smt88 7y ago
    Sure, but the problem is that there's no transparency. You don't know if your boost showed you to 50 more people, 5 more, or 0. Maybe you get a match during your boost. A random reward! And only Tinder knows whether your boost caused it or not. There's very unilateral information in every transaction with dating apps, and that's the problem.
- echelon 7y ago
  OkCupid charges more for your membership the older you are. By the time you're in your 30s the rate is outright highway robbery.
  - 7y ago

RandomBacon 7y ago

Unrelated, but I'm thinking about using one or more dating sites. Which ones do people here use, and what are your thoughts/observations?

seibelj 7y ago
I met my wife on Tinder 6 years ago, but YMMV
werber 7y ago
I've had great luck with Scruff, and have had friends who have done well with bumble
- tempsy 7y ago
  A bit presumptuous to assume the OP is a gay male, no?
  - queercode 7y ago
    It's no more presumptuous to assume OP is a straight male.
    - tempsy 7y ago
      Right. If someone asks what a good dating app is then the better thing to do is to not assume sexual orientation or gender and recommend an app for all e.g. Tinder/Coffee Meets Bagel/Hinge? I mean, just thought it was weird for a complete stranger to recommend to another complete stranger a gay hookup app for men...
      - werber 7y ago
        I just recommended Scruff first because that's where I met my partner, it's way more than just a sex app! They have events and a tinder like mode where you can only match with other people looking for a relationship.
    - deleted 7y ago

zaroth 7y ago

TFA is a bit imprecise with the wording, so it's not exactly clear to me, but from what I understand, there's two different things that could be happening. In one case, a dating site company internally creates fake profiles and/or operates bots which cause the fake profiles to interact with real potential users in an attempt to get them to sign up. This is like what AM did on their site, where there weren't actually very many women on the site at all. Alternatively, a dating site can be rife with scammers who have themselves created fake profiles on the site and are messaging potential victims. For example, I read that Tinder used to be particularly rife with bot accounts that would message obviously bot-y greetings to attempt to get a user to click an external link (to what end, I'm not sure). In the second case, dating sites may have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the scammers, who create appealing looking profiles and make the site seem to have more activity than it really does. But the real users are potentially being targeted for fraud / scams, so this is just as--if not even more--egregious than the false marketing fake account scam, because at least the company bots aren't trying to convince you to share your bank account number. It's not entirely clear to me if this is a case of #1 or #2, but it seems like it's #2. And because Match wouldn't even let potential users read the message (or see who it was from?) before signing up, the bot accounts would provide a significant signup boost to users thinking they had a potential match waiting for them on the site. If it is #2, then the immediate question is how prevalent was this, and did Match take action to close bot accounts that were reported / flagged as such. Any social network will have at least some bad actors, and the platform should be judged on how they respond and defend against those actors, not whether they existed at all. I think TFA does not provide enough information to reach a conclusion.

xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
#2 sounds like a twisted symbiotic parasitic relationship, where the host is harmed indirectly through the harm of their users. Almost like some sort of systemic effect. Fraud is such an interesting problem. Are the incentives ever truly aligned such that businesses should rigorously stamp out bad actors? Or, in a toxic twist, should they do the bare minimum to satisfy some regulatory body/their brand perception? Treacherous times indeed.
cardiffspaceman 7y ago

shartshooter 7y ago

Juicy part from the actual complaint. Since at least 2013, Defendant has maintained the following five deceptive or unfair practices to induce consumers to subscribe to Match.com and to keep them subscribed. First, until mid-2018, Defendant sent consumers misleading advertisements that tout communications from persons Defendant identified as potentially fraudulent users of Match.com and led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them. Second, until mid-2018, Defendant exposed consumers to the risk of fraud by providing recent subscribers access to communications that Defendant knew were likely to have been sent by persons engaging in fraud. Third, until mid-2019, Defendant guaranteed certain consumers a free six-month subscription renewal if they fail to “meet someone special” but failed to disclose the requirements of its “guarantee” adequately. Fourth, Defendant has misled consumers with a confusing and cumbersome cancellation process that causes consumers to believe they have canceled their subscriptions when they have not. Fifth, until mid-2019, when consumers disputed charges relating to any of these practices and lose the dispute, Defendant denied consumers access to paid-for services. [1] [1]https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_complaint.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/match_-_com...

trhway 7y ago
> led consumers to believe that the communications are from persons interested in establishing a dating relationship with them. reminded about that Ashley Madison actual ratio in their database of something like 3 real girls to ten of millions of men, with the employees&bots producing all those "communications"
malicioususer11 7y ago
didnt read all that. sounds shitty, actually...
makomk 7y ago
Wow, apparently they had a stock line they used when customers paid them money to try and view those messages that were sent by fake accounts, got a message saying the account was unavailable instead (because it had been deleted for being fraudulent), and complained to Match.com that they thought they'd been swindled: "Please be assured, Match.com does not send members misleading notifications, e-mails or winks professing romantic interest. We have too much respect for our members to ever compromise their trust. If you have received communications from members with profiles that are not immediately available, the member may have temporarily hidden their profile." That is impressively scummy.

chongli 7y ago

I think it's a fatal flaw in the dating site business model, to be honest. Their incentive is for you to stay on the site for as long as possible. If you could find a relationship quickly and then they would leave the site quickly. This would reduce the amount of ad and subscription revenue, in addition to reducing the size of the pool of "potential matches", discouraging those who have more trouble finding someone.

bigwavedave 7y ago
Ah yes, the only profession aside from medicine that exists to eradicate itself.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  I work in information security and we have effectively consulted ourselves out of a job and were happy to do it. Some customers only need our help for a while, others need it for much longer :)
- warent 7y ago
  I can't tell if you're being sarcastic. I'm inferring a tone of sarcasm from your comment but I'm not sure what you're really trying to communicate here.
  - xeromal 7y ago
    I don't think they're being sarcastic. It's a market that when done efficiently and successfully, puts itself out of business. The better medicine gets, the less patients they get.
- taneq 7y ago
  The goal of any consultancy should be to get your clients to the point where they no longer need you.
  - canada_dry 7y ago

jdkee 7y ago

At what point do we as a society, regulate the abuses promulgated by libertarianism, techno-utopianism, Reaganism and the pathologies enabled by unfettered captialism? The same social pathologies that lead to the extreme income inequality in the United States and the unchecked externalities of carbon emissions. Or not.

lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Maybe we should try a system where there's no property and the state takes care of every aspect of the citizen's life. People wouldn't need to work as much and the government would be honest and nice to everyone (except filthy dissidents). I'm sure it won't end in a totalitarian bloodshed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

paul7986 7y ago

All dating apps are filled with fakes and scams mostly perpetrated by those who own the app to milk you of your money. Ive used match on and off for awhile and the crap stunt of them sending me a bunch of likes, messages just as my subscription is expiring has always ticked me off. Ummm where were these matches the first few weeks and oh wait if i want to find out if they are fake or not i have to subscribe again. Though after the first time of realizing I was being hookwinked by match I never re-up my subscription.

14 7y ago
I on occasion would like to browse Tinder if I have time. One time after like half hour I get a pop up that I have used all my likes for the time being but if I pay I can continue to swipe right on people I like. Ok not interested in that so I will wait the 12 hours or whatever it is and not pay anything. We I forget about it and of course they send me a notification telling me someone likes me find out now who! So I load up the app and then again hit with the I have used too many likes and have a few more hours to wait. I felt a little annoyed and I have no idea if they are measuring some metric or not but like to believe they are so after I get hit with a like paywall I exit the app and do not load it for a couple days. I like to think it scares them into thinking I am leaving which is ultimately what I ended up doing.

yumario 7y ago

Rewriting one of my earlier comments: I have used Tinder (owned by Match) before and it was one of the must frustrating experiences ever. First, they do shady things with your data. Since I made a Tinder account I been getting constant ads for random dating sites. This have been going on for months. God knows how many companies now have my data. Second, they employ dark patterns: 1) Easy account deletion. Why does that matter? Because they own nearly all dating sites. Including: "BlackPeopleMeet.com, Chemistry.com, Delightful, FriendScout24, HowAboutWe, Match.com, Meetic Group, OkCupid, OurTime, People Media, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Twoo, Hinge" So, they don't care if they lose a user as long as they can shuffle them around. 2) They will keep a tab of the number of users who have like you. Then eventually that user will shown to you and you will swipe left or right. In that case the tab count will decrease. This is a complete scam. They would withhold these users to push to a pay subscription. Example: https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg https://i.redd.it/e13yeek795x21.jpg . Moreover, most of these likes a bots and fake profiles. 3) Fake notifications: https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg https://i.redd.it/r0lheira9rh31.jpg 4) Shadows-bans: I saw that my profile was getting no matches. So I made a new profile, ban! a match within minutes. Essentially they shadow ban users as a form of Neg.

dmoy 7y ago
To be fair on the last part, shadow ban can be an extremely efficient moderation tool, though for people caught up as false positive collateral damage it can really suck. This is true even in hackernews I would assume, certainly it is any other place I've moderated before.
- gizmo686 7y ago
  On a free product, I have no problems with shadow bans. On a paid product, shadow bans seem like a pretty clear case of fraud.
  - yumario 7y ago
    Yep, having used Tinder's paid boots and seeing no results. And then making a new profile with the same photos and bio! and getting results within minutes left me feeling rob and manipulated.

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

Do you think that an open source dating app or a decentralized dating protocol would be a good idea?

jimmaswell 7y ago
Dating apps are a failed idea. If you're a man and have any imperfections appearance-wise you'll go on these sites and get no responses. In college I did hundreds of swipes and sent a bunch of messages on OKC and got nothing because I wasn't a human Ken doll. I could've spent all day in the gym and gotten plastic surgery and spent hundreds on whatever wardrobe was in style but why do all that for people who can't appreciate you for anything else but how likely you are to be in a Calvin Klein ad? I've seen experiments where they put male model pictures on tinder profiles that say stuff like being nazis and convicted rapists and surprise, they got more matches (a ton) than me (0) with my well-thought-out profile/pictures but not literally Brad Pitt.
- ddenisen 7y ago
  So I've had an interesting experience recently. Like you, I've used Tinder and other dating apps fairly unsuccessfully in the past (close to zero matches, those who match don't respond, yadda yadda). I live in the US (West Coast), but I'm originally from Russia, and I finally got to go back home (a major Russian city) this summer for a few weeks' vacation. On a suggestion of a longtime friend I've met with there, I've created a Tinder profile. Just put up some mediocre photos of myself and listed my hobbies, mentioned I am visiting for a few weeks. The difference from the US was quite startling. I got literally hundreds of likes and dozens of matches. (my like counter showed 99+ after a week). The matches weren't bots either. They were actual women, and a decent number of them responded to my messages. I've actually ended up meeting four different women in person during a time span of two weeks. We've had some good in person conversations and I still keep in touch with at least one of them. They didn't seem like they just wanted me so that I can bring them to the US, either, as that never came up in conversations and they seemed fairly happy where they currently are. I was honestly quite sad to leave and come home to the USA because it felt like I'm returning to a social wasteland. Later, I've on a whim set my Tinder location to Philippines one night (might be going there for work this winter), and got a decent number of matches instantly, and the ones I've talked to responded willingly. I've also gotten a ton of matches when I was on vacation in Dominican Republic last winter. Of course, if I use my actual location (Seattle) I still get basically zero matches. I've had similar low success in Western Europe. So, your dating app status as a dude is really location dependent.

xenospn 7y ago

"How to lose all your users in 30 days"

fortran77 7y ago

You mean there aren't really hot girls in 94027 zip code looking for a date?!

degski 7y ago
Nah, they just want to have sex with you.
Scoundreller 7y ago
I like having an ISP with most of its customers in another region. It separates the low-end and the high-end geo-targeters.
buboard 7y ago
try rebooting your router
masonic 7y ago
Atherton? That's really hitting the out-of-your-league jackpot.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
The hottest girls hang out around Anonymous Proxy

1024core 7y ago

Back when I was single, I was on a dozen dating sites. It was frustrating as heck to keep getting led on by fake profiles. eHarmony is the worst: they actually sold my email address to spammers. How do I know this? I have my own domain, and use a unique (hard to guess) email address for each site I have to give an email address to. So it was trivial to nail eHarmony as the culprit. Someone has already linked to the OKCupid blog post which explained pretty well why you should not pay for a dating site. Then they were bought out by Match (how did the anti-trust people let Match accumulate so many sites?), and any principles they had went down the drain. Basically, the market is ripe for a respectful dating site. But OKCupid started this way; and in the end they sold out. What makes you think you won't sell out when the money is right?

jdm2212 7y ago
I do the same thing with a gmail address -- just do myemail+uniqueid@gmail.com, because gmail drops everything after the + for routing the email but still tells you which address it was sent to.
- dmarlow 7y ago
  I used to do this, but I kept forgetting the "uniqueid" for the sites I used. I'd often resort to using my regular email for the forget password prompts and then would have to search my inbox to figure out the correct email (if using from another device where the creds aren't saved).
  - inetknght 7y ago
    Today that problem is solved by the use of a password manager.
- Splatter 7y ago
  What's frustrating is that very many sites know of this method and simply trim the "+uniqueid" from a gmail.com address before inserting it into their database.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

joering2 7y ago

If its proven then its obviously criminal in its nature as it clearly a scam to enrich owners. If FTC prevails, does anyone have any idea what sort of consequences are we looking at? Company? Owners?

tibbydudeza 7y ago

I dunno how you can possibly quantify human emotions based on metrics and algorithms. Level 5 self driving cars is a more realistic goal to achieve than this one.

buboard 7y ago
psychologists have done it for centuries

caseysoftware 7y ago

Years ago, I briefly consulted for a dating website and fundamentally their business model is broken and their incentives are completely misaligned with the users': https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website https://caseysoftware.com/blog/working-for-a-dating-website

foobar_ 7y ago
That was a good read. > Even when you are paying for the product, you may still be the product.. Damn ... can you think of any other segment where this works as well? From my experience, most fraudulent businesses seem to be with one time customers.
- w84it 7y ago
  Television
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    Yeah Cable TV wasn't like that, but what's better, money or more money??

Impossible 7y ago

This happened to me when I tried subscribing to match years ago. Near the end of my 6 month period I got the first introduction from a woman after months of rarely getting responses. This email never resulted in anything. Paid dating sites all ended up being worthless to me and the only dates and reasonable correspondence I got on was from OKCupid (where I met my wife).

liquidise 7y ago

Former CTO of a multi-mllion user dating app. I am certain Match will claim plausible deniability here, the reality is such an argument would be a total farce. While spam prevention is technically not a "solved" problem, simple and clever techniques in addition to shadow-banning go a long way. Once an account has sufficient activity, which for spammers takes anywhere from 30s - 4hr, even modest systems can confidently identify the vast majority. A company like Match that has conglomerated other upstarts in the space surely has spammer identification systems far in excess of smaller apps. Yet somehow those competing apps often cite account authenticity as an advantage over Match. The Ashley Madison scandal exposed this business tactic. Match clearly followed suit and has been just-subtle-enough to evade legal action until now.

amelius 7y ago
Speaking of plausible deniability, those 1000s of illegally downloaded videos on my harddrive were uploaded to my computer by a botnet. But come on, if you are a large business then you should know what is going on in your company.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

Whenever I read stuff like this, I think in my head: names. We want names. We want these people to never do this again.

jacquesm 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Levin

Shaddox 7y ago

I worked for about 3/4th of a year for a dating website. The market is ...unique, to put it nicely. Employees are constantly poached. When my boss told me this I couldn't believe it but it actually happened. During lunchtime, it became an often occurrence for someone to come and talk to me to try and reveal secrets. Also they had a lot of people on payroll to pretend they're available girls on the website, in order to increase engagement and lure subscribers. One of them was a huge biker dude and it was hilarious. The truth is that on all these dating website, as someone else pointed out, the ratio is about 30 guys to 1 gal so building a dating platform is hard.

meerita 7y ago

If authorities dig a little bit more they will find all these dating websites break the GDPR laws a lot.

w84it 7y ago
Dont need no cookies if i can just https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2 https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs2 you

mnm1 7y ago

They also didn't honor their free extra months for users who didn't find a match the first six months. The whole site is a scam and shouldn't be operating.

malicioususer11 7y ago

i dont give two fucks about match.com, but its called priming the pump. not illegal, I dont think??? :)

LeonM 7y ago

I've tried a number of dating websites in the past year, and all of them are like this. First and foremost: No matter how hard they try to hide it, the male/female balance on all straight dating sites is completely off. I'd say it's about 80% male. So most of them fill with fake accounts to get the balance backs. The matching algorithms don't really exist, they are extremely primitive and usually optimised for engagement. All services show you a whole load of super attractive people on the first use (either fake or just popular profiles), only at the second day of use you get to the real profiles. Due to the imbalance and fake accounts, as a male you rarely get response on messages. Most men just give up after a while and start to spam generic pickup lines to just about every profile. Woman get loads of messages per day and stop responding. It's vicious circle. As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone. The marketing is optimised badly towards your emotions (loneliness or sexual drive), I regularly got email messages where they "urgently need men to sign up for the next dating event, because only woman have applied so far". One of the services send me a total of 8 (!) reminder emails after I cancelled my subscription, that suddenly all these photo models were trying to send me a match request but couldn't because my account was closed. I like meeting new people but online dating just raises my anxiety and frustration. I don't think this can be 'disrupted' either, it's just a terrible business to be in since the incentives are completely misaligned.

pepy 7y ago
Fractional Reserve Speed Dating http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-reserve-speed-dating.html http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2013/04/fractional-res...
arkh 7y ago
> I'd say it's about 80% male. It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone. As an experiment just make a fake profile with some model's picture to discover how many women are around.
- Lewton 7y ago
  On tinder the issue isn’t that women only go for the top 20%, the issue is that the elo algorithm is so aggressive and the gender ratio is so skewed that women won’t even see your profile if it’s in the bottom 80%

z3t4 7y ago

What about other fakes ? likes, followers, stars, collaborators, upvotes, star-reviews, backlinks, and clients. Where do you draw the line between fraud and Fake it until you make it ? Social proof is game-able and there is a whole industry dedicated to faking it. Should fakes be punished, or are you too naive for using these metrics when choosing - for example, what library to use, who to hire, or what restaurant to go to?

apexalpha 7y ago

There is only one universal law that applies to online dating, and that is: women don't need it as much as men. For women, online dating just doesn't make sense. Even on Tinder, where the ratio is kinda okay, women are bombarded with messages and likes. To the point that they can't even respond to everyone even if they wanted to. This means men are left with unresponsive women and just start to send cheaper pick up lines to more women faster. Thus continuing the cycle of women getting bombarded... There was a blog post I read once where some employee used statistics from the dating site to show what the relationship between male and female profiles where, who had good chance of getting dates etc... Conclusion: it really doesn't work for 90% of men.

AdrianB1 7y ago
I know a few women that use Tinder: they are alone, late thirties and never got anything serious out of Tinder, but they use it to reassure their attractiveness by the continuous flow of likes they get. It is a morale booster, nothing more.
- stochastic_monk 7y ago
  I know plenty of straight couples who are married or in committed long term relationships and met on tinder.
  - AdrianB1 7y ago
    I am not contesting that, I just answered to "For women, online dating just doesn't make sense".
  - LeonM 7y ago
    I think there is a big early adopter advantage of any dating platform. After a while, the platform just deteriorates and starts attracting opportunists. I also know a bunch of couples that met on tinder, but it's all from 3 years ago. I haven't heard of someone else who has been successful in finding a long term relationship on Tinder since.

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mschuster91 7y ago

To all those ITT complaining about bots... check out the fetish/kink/niche dating sites. Granted there's still a problem with thirsty dudes if you're female but at least no bots. If you're looking for random sex, many swinger clubs also allow single men (single females are almost universally welcome), either always or at special events. If you're in a relationship and your s/o is interested, I can also recommend visiting swinger clubs for a change.

anonymousmatch 7y ago

I'm quite hesitant to tell this story and unfortunately, because I'm ashamed of myself, and for privacy reasons I had to create a new account for this but I wanted to tell the story of the day my mother fell in love with me. Long story short, many years ago I was working for a provider that was building algorithms for various dating websites. The goal was simple: Increase signups. A Little Bit of Background -------------------------- As a small group of rather "creative" engineers in their early twenties encouraged by large sums of money we came up with the idea of building "Matching Personas" which would be able to have a basic conversation, as well as have similar interests in the target subject. Keep in mind that some of those dating sites have various "upgrade" (read payment) paths. Some had a "3 private messages" limit so that you can start chatting with someone but to continue the conversation, you needed to upgrade to premium. The typical path for a user was: 1. Visit the website and search for what they're interested in 2. See a few profiles and decide whether online dating was their thing 3. Invest personal time creating a profile and putting down their interests, photos, etc. Point #3 is where the magic came in. I had been working on automating the creation of accounts, and more importantly the creation of what we used to call smart-accounts. After a few months we had increased the conversion rate by about 30% on average (Which is MASSIVE) and our internal funding was getting larger and larger. Our smart accounts ended up being able to recognize certain items in photos, understand the interests of new users, have "similar" interests that are either the same or tangentially related, similar number of kids, etc. etc. Based on real matches we built an engine that learnt what people look for when they convert. How the conversations go, the type of language used when discussing, the similarities in interests and family, etc. Honestly a really wide set of super interesting machine learning problems from object recognition to natural language processing to recommender systems to LTSM, etc. It was pretty simple. A user signs up and they put some of their information in. Our engine picks up the latest user's information, creates about 10 different "smart profiles" that the new user is likely to match, and then in the search results display those smart-accounts to the new user who just joined. The new user would see smart accounts, and start chatting with them on their free accounts. Because we knew based on previous real matches and real conversations how people ended up "being together", the unsuspecting free users. The conversion path was: Signup -> Fill profile -> See someone you like -> Converse -> Upgrade. The Day my Mother Fell in Love with Me -------------------------------------- Now that you have a little bit of background, the story begins. I had been working for many of the dating companies (most of them competitors) for a few months and our smart-profiles were getting quite clever. One night after my mother invited me for diner. We started eating and drinking wine and just talking in general. I never talked about the general aspects of my work but she knew I worked with computers and back then statistics now machine learning now everything-is-AI-anyways. Whilst on the topic of computers, she said: "Oh I haven't told you, I've actually met someone online". I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was quite nice. Then she proceeded to tell me the following: "He also has 3 kids, he likes a lot of the same stuff I like which is really nice, and we started chatting and he's really nice. He's gone on a business trip now so we haven't talked in a few days but I'm looking forward to talking to him again". At that moment I became very suspicious because all the signs pointed to exactly what we had been aiming at achieving. Get users to like someone, signup, chat (Which had a limit of 50 free messages at the time for that particular platform if I remember), and convert (pay) to have more chats. The trick was when people upgraded, within hours, we had some canned answers like "I'm going on a business trip won't be able to talk for about 2 weeks". Either way, I started asking my mother a few more questions and she explained to me that she had found him after signing up and they chatted a little bit but she had to upgrade yaddi yadda and it wasn't cheap but she was glad she didn't end up wasting so much time online dating like all those other people online dating. Then I asked her about the particular website and it was one we had been working with. She had actually fallen in love with my bots. I felt terrible not only for my mother but for the thousands of other people we had basically scammed, and only at that moment did it hit me. Up until then it was a fun challenging ML engineering problem with real-world subjects. I quit the following day and have never been affiliated or interested in either working or using online dating since. Even though I do have friends who got married to people they have met online dating, it made me a cynical.

gerardnll 7y ago

How weird, yesterday, someone signed up using my email on match.com and firstmet.com, what a coincidence...

oldmanthrowit 7y ago

A decade or so ago I worked at AdultFriendFinder.com, then the largest dating site. We had 20 or so different properties, covering every niche from "jewishfriendfinder" to "alt.com" On paper we had about 50 million users. The reality was that we were a porn site, and our business was entirely driven by porn site referrals. Our smarter referral partners would game the system to setup thousand of users to get extra bonuses, and we encouraged it, so that we could ethically claim that we didn't create the fake users. These sorts of lies are pretty much status quo in the dating industry. Zoosk is far worse, I walked away from a contract there when I realized how much of a sleazeball their founder, Shayan Zadeh, really was/

oldmanthrowit 7y ago

OKCupid and Tinder, I think, are the only honest dating sites, and they've gotten far less so the past few years.

SaturateDK 7y ago
Not surprising... the new owners of both OKCupid and Tinder is Match Group.
- oldmanthrowit 7y ago
  OKCupid held onto their integrity as long as they could. After the HotOrNot-derived dating apps popped up, and the Match purchase, they definitely lost their way. If I had to date again, I would just meet people at bars, without OKCupid's rather effective personality matches (engaged to one person I met there, married another, slept with dozens), dating apps mostly seem pointless.

greggman2 7y ago

Japan has "Pairs" with no free tier. Doesn't seem to have fake profiles. "Dine" also has no free tier for men but seems to be 50% fake profiles just based on how professional the profile photos look relative to all other sites .

burneraccount12 7y ago

Dating threads on HN honestly could be confused for incel message boards on Reddit. Some real quotes from this thread: 1. "As a male, it becomes very difficult to stand out if you are actually interested in someone." 2. "I know a few women that use Tinder: they are alone, late thirties and never got anything serious out of Tinder, but they use it to reassure their attractiveness" 3. "Bumble's rule is that Men are not even allowed to initiate contact...Given everything else happening in the world around gender discrimination, I find it interesting that a discussion around Bumble's practises has not come up." 4. "It's more like most women will go for 20% of the men. If you're part of the 80% you'll feel alone." 5. "All dating apps are filled with fakes and scams mostly perpetrated by those who own the app to milk you of your money." 6. "They're playing with people's emotions and not just giving them nothing - they're abusing people's most basic need of feeling loved." Burner account because this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but guys: grow up. Stop whining. Stop blaming women -- they pursue the most attractive males just like you pursue the most attractive women, it's normal. If you want to improve your dating prospects, get in shape. Anyone can get in shape, doesn't matter how rich or successful or handsome your face is. Second, improve your social skills / join something. Volunteer somewhere. Join a run or hiking club. Don't just sit behind your computer and foam at the mouth how all the "Chads" are taking all the "Staceys". HN has, IMHO, the best commentary about tech on the internet. And the absolute worst commentary on dating.

tictok4 7y ago
>If you want to improve your dating prospects, get in shape. Anyone can get in shape, doesn't matter how rich or successful or handsome your face is. >Second, improve your social skills / join something. Yes to both of these. Dating or not these are vital in life.
- Jonathanks 7y ago
  "Dating or not, these are vital in life." I don't mean to be pedantic, but, without the comma, I read it wrong twice. I agree with you totally. I'm currently looking for a course I can volunteer for outside my day job.
- 7y ago

jrnichols 7y ago

I have no doubt that Tinder is also loaded with fake profiles to encourage user engagement as well.

chrift 7y ago
I am also of the mind that all the social media platforms do this. I hardly ever use Instagram, but whenever I get a notification from someone I know is obviously fake I always get caught in the rabbit hole of my feed.

rootusrootus 7y ago

I wonder if I would be successful today, were I looking for someone using an online service. 11 years ago I met my wife on Match, and I had had dated a few other people from the site before I met her. I am just average looking for sure, maybe these days I wouldn't get any responses at all.

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